In the past, it has been difficult for businesses to track the delivery and performance of service provider services, e.g. telecommunications, on an ongoing basis. The four key difficulties in tracking the variance between targeted and actual service provider performance metrics are that (i) identifying appropriate targets has been difficult, (ii) measuring actual performance on a regular basis has been time consuming if not impossible, (iii) comparing the actual performance with targeted performance has been prohibitively time consuming and, (iv) taking the proper action once acceptable variances have been exceeded has been difficult and costly.
In most cases a business would need to rely on the service provider vendor to police itself and inform the business if the service provider's service being provided had fallen below promised levels of service or if rates had fallen below the company's existing rates or if bills were inaccurate and so on. In some limited cases, bill auditing, for example, the business could hire an outside, independent firm to determine the variance between actual and targeted services. The process these third-party firms would use would be manual and limited in scope. This lack of an objective, comprehensive monitoring system has resulted in higher rates and lower levels of service delivery and/or performance than the user expected.
Historically, users have filed service provider contracts and service level agreements away after execution. These agreements have been difficult to refer to during their term to ensure compliance. Also, further compounding the difficulty, is that separate groups within an organization typically handle service procurement, contract management and accounts payable. While these three disciplines all need to be involved to manage properly a company's service provider expenditures, it is not atypical that the three groups have limited or no communication during the service provider contract term.
This invention is comprehensive in that it measures the variance across multiple categories such as rates, billing, service levels, contracts, utilization and design. Also, this invention covers all major types of service provider services including voice and data, Internet, wireline, wireless based services and service provider agreements such as application, storage, management, Internet, online, telecommunications, peering, collocation, T-carrier, E-carrier, and DS0 multiples, fractional T-1, fractional T-3, information, outsourcing, hosting, financial, service level, data, voice, utilities, gas, water, sewer and combinations of these.